The “Rules-Based Order” Is (and always was) a Fairy Tale

People keep talking about “returning to the rules-based international order” like it’s some lost golden age we can reboot if we just say the right words in Brussels or Washington.

I'm sorry, but that’s an absolute joke.

Because the first question we need to ask is the only honest one:

Rules for who?

If you’re going to call something a “rules-based order,” you have to be willing to say out loud what those rules actually were—and who they were designed to protect.

The post-1945 myth: “order” for the winners, chaos for everyone else

When people cite the “post-World War II order,” they often mean: Western dominance with paperwork.

They mean institutions that look universal—UN, Bretton Woods, “international law”—but were structured around winner’s privilege from the beginning. The UN Security Council veto is the cleanest symbol: a global governance system where a few permanent members can block outcomes regardless of what most of the world wants. That isn’t “rules.” That’s hierarchy with a legal aesthetic.

And yes, there was decolonization. But a huge amount of what followed was neo-imperial reconfiguration, not liberation: coups, interventions, debt regimes, structural adjustment, extraction—just updated techniques, updated vocabulary, updated PR.

A “rules-based order” where the U.S. doesn’t follow the rules

If the “rules-based order” is real, the rules have to bind the strong as well as the weak. But look at the International Criminal Court: the U.S. is not a party to the Rome Statute, and U.S. policy has repeatedly treated the court as something to pressure or punish rather than submit to (background here). And this isn’t abstract. In early 2026, reporting detailed how ICC officials were living under U.S. sanctions—credit cards canceled, accounts disrupted— sanctions imposed in retaliation for ICC investigations, despite the U.S. not being a member (The Guardian). Reuters reported the same general coercive posture around sanctions threats and ICC pressure: (Reuters)

That’s not “rules-based order.”

That’s rules are for other people.

“Polite Europe” and coercion with a smile

Europe’s modern style is often polite power: the claim that it is helping, modernizing, guiding, developing—while the underlying relationship is still extractive.

You can see the rhetorical shift clearly when European leaders talk about “partnership” and “cooperation,” but the substance often remains: access to resources, migration management, geopolitical influence—on European terms. Of all people, Italian PM Giorgia Meloni has enunciated this very clearly as she has broken from the standard European talking points, by taking clear stances on more equal 'development' regimes with Africa; using language that reveals the core truths of recent European stances: cooperation only exists between equals— not between a “helper” and a “helped.” (Italian government speech)

But this is not the normal position in Europe, and if the whole block could see the Global South as “equal partners”, then “cooperation” would require real sacrifices: fair prices, real technology transfer, real policy space, and the end of monetary and financial architecture that locks former colonies into dependency.

On the monetary side, the CFA franc system sits right in the middle of this debate—contested, defended by France as voluntary, rightly criticized by others as a structural constraint built to perpetuate neo-colonial logics/relationships. Whether you call it “cooperation” or “control,” the point is that this is what the old order looks like in practice. (France’s framing)

Rubio’s nostalgia is not subtle—he’s just saying the quiet part out loud

The reason this “rules-based order” debate is heating up right now is that some Western figures are openly nostalgic for a time when domination didn’t even need legitimacy language.

At the 2026 Munich Security Conference, Rubio framed the “rules-based order” as illusion—paired with a civilizational, inheritance-based story about “the West.” (video; see also the Washington Post commentary)

And here’s the core: that nostalgia only feels “reasonable” if you’re speaking from inside 500 years of Euro-American supremacy. If you’re speaking from outside it, it’s not “order.” It’s just the world-system returning to the explicit brutality of the colonial era.

What a real “rules-based order” would actually mean (and why the West can’t deliver it)

If the West wanted legitimacy, it would have to support rules that constrain Western power as much as anyone else’s:

• no special veto club deciding global outcomes
• international law that applies to major powers in practice, not rhetoric
• trade and resource pricing that doesn’t assume the Global South exists to subsidize Northern lifestyles
• financial institutions that stop disciplining countries for choosing non-Western development paths
• non-intervention as a principle, not a slogan

In other words: a genuinely post-colonial world order.

That is exactly what the West has never been willing to build—because it would require giving up the structural advantages that made it rich.

The legitimacy vacuum: why China doesn’t even need to “win” the argument

Here’s the part that matters geopolitically:

Even people who are uncomfortable with China’s internal politics can still see that the West has lost ethical standing—because the West keeps demanding obedience to rules it doesn’t obey, while narrating its dominance as “values.” 

That legitimacy collapse didn’t happen overnight. It’s been accumulating for decades, and it’s increasingly visible in how global publics and many states interpret Western actions. The result is a vacuum. And in a vacuum, China doesn’t need to be morally pure. It only needs to treat others with more consistent dignity than the West. Thus becoming a plausible alternative—an option in a world where “there is no alternative” was the West’s favorite weapon.

The simplest conclusion

The “rules-based order” wasn’t a neutral set of rules.

It was power that could still pretend it wasn’t power.

And now that the pretense is collapsing, Western elites want to “return” to it—not because it was just, but because it was useful. It let them dominate while telling themselves a story about benevolence.

The future isn’t “going back.”

The future is: either the West learns how to live in a world of equals—or it keeps accelerating its own isolation, as more and more countries decide they’re done swallowing fairy tales.

Mutual Aid vs. America First: Why Transactional Empire Pushes Allies Toward China

 

The myth: “law of the jungle” politics is natural. The reality: humans (and a lot of the animal world) survive by cooperation, relationship, and mutual obligation.

I’m watching coverage of Canada moving toward deeper economic relationships with China—and the obvious backdrop is that Trump is alienating allies at exactly the moment the U.S. needs trust, strategic patience, and long memory.

The deeper issue isn’t partisan drama. It’s civilizational: there is no durable “law of the jungle” model for human life. That idea is a story we tell inside capitalism. And it’s a story that collapses the minute you look seriously at how people have actually survived across history. 

America First Isn’t Isolationism—It’s Transactional Empire

“America First” gets misread as restraint. But in practice—especially under Trump—it becomes a license: we do what we want, when we want, and relationships are secondary to leverage. 

And under Trump, America First isn’t isolationism, it’s a license for Empire built out of a broader sense of “impunity” that spans the Monroe → Roosevelt → Donroe → Bibi Netanyahu-style politics of “do what you want because nobody will stop you” (The Monroe Doctrine, the Donroe Doctrine, or the BIBI Doctrine? The evolution of a politics of impunity).

The point here is simple: Trump’s core move is to treat the world like New York real estate— everything is a deal, everyone is replaceable, and the only thing that matters is the immediate transaction. But geopolitics isn’t a condo project. It’s entire nations, public opinions, cultural barriers, nevermind supply chains, raw materials, security commitments, war-risk, diplomatic memory, and reputational inertia.

Mutual Aid Is Not “Nice.” It’s How Humans Actually Survive.

The “every man for himself” fantasy sounds tough. It also misunderstands human history. If you zoom out far enough—bands, villages, informal economies, subsistence systems, even disaster response— you see the same pattern: cooperation is the baseline.

This is exactly what Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid argued against Social Darwinist myth-making: cooperation isn’t a moral add-on; it’s a survival strategy embedded in evolution and social life.

Even the most “independent” lifeways people romanticize—homesteading, rural self-reliance, “frontier grit”—are historically communal. You can’t raise a barn alone. You can’t build a house alone. You can’t defend a village, coordinate harvest, share childcare, or survive winter shocks without reciprocal support and social infrastructure.

This is also what my research in squats and autonomous centers shows in practice: you don’t get autonomy without community. “Self-sufficiency” is almost always a collective achievement disguised as an individual virtue.

What Trump Misses: Trust Is an Infrastructure

In international relations terms, Trump is burning the resource that actually makes alliances work: credibility.

Classic IR work on “complex interdependence” emphasizes that states aren’t just isolated billiard balls; they’re entangled through trade, institutions, and mutual vulnerability—meaning cooperation is often rational, not naïve. (See Keohane & Nye, Power and Interdependence.)

When you threaten allies (tariffs, annexation talk, coercive leverage) you’re teaching them a lesson: the U.S. is not a relationship partner; it’s a transactional risk. And rational actors hedge risks. That’s how you get allies diversifying toward China—not because they suddenly love China, but because they can’t trust the U.S. not to turn on them the minute it’s convenient.

This is why the “America First” posture doesn’t create strength long-term. It creates isolation-by-design: people cooperate elsewhere because your “friendship” is structurally unstable.

Anthropology’s Point: Politics Is Social, Not Mechanical

A lot of mainstream political talk treats states like rational calculators and “order” like a set of rules enforced from above. Anthropology tends to notice something different: politics is lived inside relationships, legitimacy, and everyday practices.

If you want strong anthropology anchors for this: Julia Paley’s work on democracy and power, Carol Greenhouse on law/citizenship and political fractures, and David Nugent on state formation and political modernity are all useful touchpoints.

They’re different projects, but they converge on a shared reality: political order depends on social foundations—and when you treat politics as pure leverage, you corrode the foundations you later need.

The Daoist Warning: “We’ll See.”

There’s an old Daoist parable people often summarize as “good luck / bad luck—who knows?” It’s commonly known through the idiom 塞翁失马 (“the old man lost his horse”), traced to the Huainanzi.

The point isn’t mystical. It’s strategic humility: short-term wins can generate long-term losses. You can “get the minerals,” “win the negotiation,” “force the tariff,” “take the territory,” and still lose the alliance system that made your power stable in the first place.

Trump keeps acting like every outcome is immediate and final: “We won.” “We got it.” Daoist logic says: you don’t know what you just set in motion.

Why This Pushes Countries Toward China

When the U.S. signals that it will treat allies the same way it treats targets—coercion, extraction, humiliation, constant leverage—then the rational response is diversification.

• Canada builds parallel options.
• Europe hedges and rethinks dependence.
• Smaller states look for multi-alignment strategies.
• Everyone learns to treat the U.S. as a risk factor, not a stable partner.

That doesn’t automatically mean China “wins.” It means the U.S. is voluntarily dissolving the trust that made its leadership possible. And in world politics, trust is power.

Related reading inside the Alternative Ideas ecosystem

• America First Isn’t Isolationism—It’s a License for Empire
• The Monroe Doctrine, the Donroe Doctrine, or the BIBI Doctrine?
• Sovereignty Without Permission: Why Latin America Needs their own version of “NATO”
• The Age of Dependency: How We Lost Our Personal Sovereignty

Also relevant on Interpreting Capitalism

There is a clear time in here to the “anarchist interpretations of capitalism” at Anarchism (Interpreting Capitalism). It directly frames anarchist autonomy as inherently social (mutual aid) rather than the capitalist myth of “autonomy” as isolated self-interest.

Bottom line: the long arc of human survival is mutual aid, not the jungle. Trump’s America First posture turns the U.S. into a coercive, transactional actor—so people hedge away. That’s not betrayal. It’s adaptation.